Friday 2 May 2014

Sam Kriss: "The DSM-5: A Dystopian Novel"

The original post will be rewritten. In the meantime, here's another dystopia: 



Sections like those on the personality disorders offer a terrifying glimpse of a futuristic system of repression, one in which deviance isn’t furiously stamped out like it is in Orwell’s unsubtle Oceania, but pathologized instead. Here there’s no need for any rats, and the diagnostician can honestly believe she’s doing the right thing; it’s all in the name of restoring the sick to health. DSM-5 describes a nightmare society in which human beings are individuated, sick, and alone.  
I have been reading the mental illness sections of the ICD-10, and there I also find "a nightmare society in which human beings are individuated, sick, and alone". 

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